A Decade of Easyling–website localization for the masses

I had the opportunity to catch up with Balázs Benedek, CTO at Easyling based in Budapest, Hungary, and the topic of Easyling reaching its tenth anniversary came up. I wanted to share with you Easyling’s history. Easyling is a brand that many in the localization space may have run into at one of many conferences but may not know about their truly auto-magical technology! (For the sake of full disclosure, LocFluent Consulting is a Brand Ambassador for Easyling). But first a quick primer on translation proxy technology, which is the core of Easyling’s product…

Translating a website’s content with an elevated level of quality can be labor intensive. This is due not only to the translation effort but also to the managing of content. Modern translation management systems need to parse the content sentence by sentence so the translation can be stored and reused. Undertaking this technical process can be difficult given the myriad number of website content management systems available today. But, for anyone who has typed a URL into Google Translate you may have already encountered translation proxy. The translated content (albeit by a Google machine translation engine) automatically appears in the layout of the original website. This type of technical wizardry can be used to manage the production of translation, automatically displaying it in the same format as the original with little technical and/or administrative effort. The technology that makes that happen is called Translation Proxy. In short, a Translation Proxy Service (TPS) separates content from layout and allows for the replacement of the textual content to be substituted on-the-fly over the web. The automatic separation of the text layer from the design layer in the website avoids a lot of the technical challenges of moving content out of and into a content management system. It also has the added benefit of being CMS agnostic.

An Interview with Balázs Benedek, CTO of Easyling

LocFluent:  In 2010, what drove you to launch Easyling? There are lots of technical problems in the world. Why TPS technology?

Balázs Benedek: We just wanted to solve our own problem. We had a product website that we wanted to translate to English, powered by a rare CMS. Our local LSP wanted us to copy/paste the content. At that time, we weren’t aware that Translation Proxy technology even existed. Instead, we developed a dual approach, server-side proxy & client-side JavaScript translation, together. Then later we learned about TPS.

LF: So, you didn’t even start the company with a vision toward TPS. What’s your background in technology? What brought you to the Geek Side?

BB:  I’ve been developing & researching innovative technologies, since the age of 8! The early days of personal computers grabbed my attention in 1983, then the DOS/Windows/PC/Internet…. Exciting times! Then I participated in several programming contests, International Science and Engineering Fair (https://www.societyforscience.org/alumni/isef-alumni/), ACM’s International Computer Programming Contest (https://icpc.global/),  etc. Later we started to organize similar events for others (http://ch24.org/)

LF: I remember when we first met at a memoQ user conference eight or nine years ago, you said that Hungary, being a small country, requires that everyone be good at math and science. It is no surprise that language and technology play a crucial role in the tech sector in Hungary given that Hungarian is not a language many outsiders are able to learn. That means you all must be able to engage your customers in their preferred language. I guess that’s why Budapest has been a hotbed for language tech for many years. In that environment, what has made Easyling a success?

BB: Timing has been in our favor with the dawn of Google’s public cloud offering coinciding with the development of Easyling. Since its founding, Easyling has been bootstrapped, and Google’s public cloud offering provided us with a scalable, robust infrastructure and a global presence.

LF: So, when you say “public cloud offering” you mean Easyling’s ability to host the service in the cloud with costs based on usage. I can imagine that it has leveled the playing field quite a bit between competitors in the space. What’s the TPS competitive space like now and how did it evolve over the last decade? Easyling was one of the first, right?

BB: Easyling was amongst what’s called the “2nd generation of proxies”, built around public cloud, amongst Reverbeo and Smartling. The first to offer (this type of service) were MotionPoint and TransPerfect. And even before them, there was a solution, the 0th generation proxy, running as an Apache proxy module. 

LF: What makes Easyling a logical choice for most LSPs doing work in website localization?

BB: Currently, Easyling is the only independent translation proxy offering available for LSPs.  To be able to offer a translation proxy solution they would have to partner with a direct competitor or build the solution themselves. Since we do not offer language services, we are a reliable partner that helps them add value to their language services.

LF: What’s next for Easyling and TPS in general?

BB: I believe a hybrid solution that utilizes both proxy and Javascript will be next–proxy for SEO; JavaScript for cost efficiency and increased privacy. I believe our solution’s ability to provide context for translation is a big advantage. It can also be used just for content connector extraction. All these features are highly valuable. If you would like to learn more about Easyling, and how your organization can use it to tackle website localization easily and cost-effectively with full control over the translation process, visit easyling.com